


oh, i wish i had someone

by la_victorienne



Category: Torchwood
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-07-20
Updated: 2008-07-20
Packaged: 2018-10-16 00:46:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10560544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/la_victorienne/pseuds/la_victorienne
Summary: post-wedding aftermath, and a little bit of stargazing.





	

It’s been a long night, and looking to get longer, by the time Ianto lifts the last flower arrangement from the table and places it in the boot of the SUV. His feet hurt and his eyes are bleary and he’s not sure how he’s going to get back to the Hub safely, much less back to his home, and there’s a buzz of champagne still floating through his muscles and the bitter, unstoppable ache of being second best, again. Nothing’s gone right, but everything turned out well somehow, and now Gwen is with her husband for a while pretending that it’s Jack’s eyes she’s seeing and Jack himself has swanned off as usual, and the way Owen is looking it’s a wonder the man doesn’t sleep. Toshiko’s already curled in the SUV’s back, her head pillowed on her purse, and Jesus, if everything Torchwood won’t go wrong just because it wants to.

And there Ianto stands. In the ruins. Picking up debris, piece by piece.

In months, when Cardiff is shattered by a psychopathic ex-boyfriend and his long lost brother-master, Ianto will have to pick up the debris literally, with his own hands. Long hours and sweat-drenched, sun-stiffened shirts, a kind of manual labor that will sink itself into his soft fingers, linger in calluses not brought by holding an unfamiliar gun. But for now, for this moment, he has only the strength to reach for the boot door and slam it shut, jarring Tosh a little but not waking her, and to call Owen over from where he is standing looking at the sky.

“Ready, then?” Owen’s eyes drift lazily over to him and he gives a barely-perceptible nod.

“Just a moment, yeah?” Ianto walks to stand with him and look upwards, too, wondering what it is Owen sees in the winking lights. Owen just hums a familiar sight and claps Ianto on the back, but gently. “Makes you think of Jack, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Ianto agrees, for once not needing the banter and conflict to know that he and Owen are friends. “And all the places I’ll never see.”

They’re lonely, Torchwood. They believe in things unseen and breathe impossibility. But there are things they just can’t do, and people they just can’t be. And Ianto knows, through the blinders he willingly wears, that Jack is one of those things, one of those people. And he, Ianto Jones, is not.


End file.
